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Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You

FOR all the human traffic that the Web attracts, most sites remain fairly solitary destinations. People shop by themselves, retrieve information alone and post messages that they hope others will eventually notice. But some sites are looking for ways to enable visitors not only to interact but even to collaborate to change the sites themselves.

Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com) is one such site, a place where 100 or so volunteers have been working since January to compile a free encyclopedia. Using a relatively unknown and simple software tool called Wiki, they are involved in a kind of virtual barn-raising.

Their work, which so far consists of some 10,000 entries ranging from Abba to zygote, in some ways resembles the ad hoc effort that went into building the Linux operating system. What they have accomplished suggests that the Web can be a fertile environment in which people work side by side and get along with one another. And getting along, in the end, may ultimately be more remarkable than developing a full-fledged encyclopedia.

That is because Wikipedians, as they call themselves, can not only contribute whatever they want but can also edit entries posted by other writers as they see fit. Anyone who visits the site is encouraged to participate by a note at the bottom of each page that says, ''You can edit this page right now!'' While that may sound like a recipe for authorial anarchy, the quest for communal knowledge seems to have prevailed so far over any attempt to pit individual opinions against one another.

''It's kind of surprising that you could just open up a site and let people work,'' said Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's co-founder and the chief executive of Bomis, a San Diego search engine company that donates the computer resources for the project. ''There's kind of this real social pressure to not argue about things.'' Instead, he said, ''there's a general consensus among all of the really busy volunteers about what an encyclopedia article needs to be like.''

He cited an entry on Bill Clinton as an example of how people might have different opinions on a topic but still be able to produce a consensus.

''If you don't like him or if you do like him that's fine,'' Mr. Wales said. ''But an encyclopedia article about him just really needs to stick directly to the facts. I should be able to write something about Bill Clinton that a supporter or a detractor could both agree on. And it's surprising that so far the social pressure has worked very well.''

Indeed, the Clinton entry seems to relate neutral facts about his presidency, including controversial acts like his last-minute pardons of convicted felons.

If peer pressure encourages the volunteers to strive for objectivity, it is the Wiki software system that allows the group to pool their collective knowledge. ''Wiki is kind of like a discussion group that is continuously constructing its own F.A.Q.,'' or frequently asked questions, said Ward Cunningham, a software consultant in Portland, Ore., who developed Wiki (named for the Hawaiian word wikiwiki, which means fast) in 1994. He was seeking a way to develop a programmers' discussion group that might avoid the sequential and repetitive postings that often spin a topic vigorously without yielding a consensus or even a concise record of how people have disagreed.

The Wiki software, which is available free at www.wiki.org and can be installed by another site's administrator, requires no special plug-ins or downloading by the user. Each page on a Wiki-enabled site comes with a handful of links that users can click on to make changes. Mr. Wales describes the process of editing and repositioning passages as ''self-healing.'' The result is a continually updated text in which comments can be refined, mistakes corrected and duplications eliminated.

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''I can start an article that will consist of one paragraph, and then a real expert will come along and add three paragraphs and clean up my one paragraph,'' said Larry Sanger of Las Vegas, who founded Wikipedia with Mr. Wales. (He also works as the editor in chief of another online encyclopedia, Nupedia, which relies on a more traditional system of peer-review editing to assemble its contents.) ''Then another expert will come along and change the whole thing to something that's even better and add in two new sections as well as a couple of new articles that sort of support the main article. It's constantly growing.''

Whether it's constantly improving is another question. While Wikipedia has entries that are comparable to what might be found in a traditional encyclopedia -- the ones on capitalism and number theory, for example -- most are clearly works in progress, marred less by mistakes than what might be called uncertainties. The Bill Clinton entry, for instance, said in late August he was ''a two (more?) time governor of the state of Arkansas.'' Within two weeks it was updated to reflect the years he served as governor. (He served six two-year terms, or 12 years over a 14-year period.)

Mr. Sanger said that the contributors consisted mainly of young men, many of them computer programmers or academics, from around the world. He said that it was important to remember that the project began only in January. ''Wikipedia is designed to be as easy as possible for anyone to change, and therefore the quality is constantly improving,'' he said.

But that unfettered ability to change entries also introduces the possibility that an opinionated renegade, not to mention a vandal, might come along and ruin the group's work. ''We've been fortunate so far,'' Mr. Wales said. ''So far we haven't had any Internet lunatics stumble upon us.''

He said that backup copies were periodically created to ensure that any destructive deletions could be reversed. But over all the project has been remarkably civil, he said, considering the name-calling that often breaks out in online discussion groups.

It is unclear, of course, whether the world needs another encyclopedia. Vast information is already available on the Web, and while much of it is scattered among disparate sites, search engines have made it easier to find it. One trend in Wikipedia's favor is the charging of fees at some sites for access to their content. In July Encyclopaedia Britannica began charging $5 a month for access.

But even if Wikipedia doesn't become a popular resource it may survive, even thrive, because of what it offers to those working on it.

That is the view of James J. O'Donnell, a professor of classical studies and vice provost for information systems at the University of Pennsylvania who examined the influence of digital media on writing in his book ''Avatars of the Word'' (Harvard University Press, 1998), ''I had a strong sense as I went in that I was in a community of people who were talking to each other,'' he said of his explorations of Wikipedia.

''The thing and the experience may be much more valuable for those who are creating it than it is for somebody who just walks in saying, 'So when is the Second Punic War and which one was that?' '' Mr. O'Donnell said. ''A community that finds a way to talk in this way is creating education and online discourse at a higher level.''

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A version of this article appears in print on September 20, 2001, on Page G00002 of the National edition with the headline: Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe